Playstation Store to Receive Revamp Mid-April

If you thought that the current Playstation Store was ugly, then you are in for a treat. The entire store will be revamped and unveiled mid-April, via a firmware update. Although the current store works, I never found it to be visually appealing, and for such a great console, you'd imagine that the built-in store would at least reflect the clean styling of the rest of the PS3s UI.

Well... that's exactly what the forthcoming update is going to tackle, as you can see in the below screenshot. Nice use of curves and gradients along with a cleaner template make for a store that's far easier to look at, and one that could very well be fun to navigate.

The downside in all of this? Absolutely no new content will be unveiled between now and the updated store's launch, which essentially means I have to go weeks before being let down by the fact that Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko still isn't available as a downloadable title!

Customers will be able to access, browse, shop and download content as usual prior to the store’s re-opening. However, no additional downloadable content will be posted prior to then, including this Thursday, April 3rd, and next Thursday, April 10th. Regularly scheduled content updates will resume with the Store’s re-opening, at which time additional games and game-related items will be added, including the downloadable version of the highly-anticipated exclusive PS3 title Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

Source: Playstation Blog

DisplayLink Offers First Beta Drivers for Mac OS X

For those unaware, DisplayLink is a company and technology with the same name, and the product is one that allows daisy-chaining displays via a USB cable. I took a look at the technology back in January and was left rather impressed. Though I am anticipating an updated version more than anything, the product I did have worked a lot better than I expected, and it's a real feasible product that should suffice for most consumers.

What the technology did lack, though, were OS X drivers to enable the functionality. Well now, the company has released beta drivers for all to test out, however, they are called "beta" for a reason. Right now, they lack both 2D and 3D acceleration, so performance will be worse than what's seen on Windows XP or Vista. So needless to say, DisplayLink for Mac is en route, but now is not the time to purchase an adapter.

Thing is, it doesn’t support any kind of acceleration, so any kind of hardware-based tracking, smoothing, filters, or hardware handling of codecs is inapplicable. Bad news, but chances are if you’re using USB as your primary display connection, you’re not using too much hardware acceleration. It looks like there are a lot of limitations, but it is beta after all.

Source: CrunchGear

Is Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Ever Going to See the Light of Day?

If there is one thing Gentoo Linux can't seem to catch, it's a break. Since the 2007.0 release, the distro's future has been plastered with uncertainty, all for varying reasons. Gentoo's developers mean well, but it seems something always happens that prevents smooth upgrades. As a result, the 2007.1 release was entirely cancelled... something that did not help the distros image.

The next release is 2008.0... one that should have been in public beta in early March and officially released as of this point, but once again, we are a month behind. The problem isn't so much that the crew are behind schedule, but the fact that the public are left oblivious... not even a simple news post was made to fill people in. To me, that's a big no no, and only clouds the distros image even further.

As it turns out, though, there are good reasons for this latest delay. One of the main reasons was due to a death of a close relative of two key developers - completely understandable. The other reasons are due to "usual delays that affect most open-source projects" and also due to upgrades in their release processes. So, Gentoo is still alive and well, and that's all that matters. Like Duke Nukem Forever, 2008.0 will get here when it gets here.

Source: Gentoo.org

Our 2008 Survey Contest is OVER!

Ahh, April 1st. The smell of spring is in the air and the sun is shining, what's not to love? Well, if you didn't find three-minutes during the entire month of March to enter our huge contest, then that's something definitely not to love!

Allow me to send out a massive Thank You! to everyone who partook in this contest and made it such a great success. It was our goal to get reader input, and that's something we certainly accomplished. Our original target for entries was far surpassed, so the Techgage staff has a lot of reading and data crunching in their future!

If you signed up during the month and did not receive an e-mail, don't worry... I will be e-mailing every one of you today or early tomorrow manually. If you don't receive an e-mail from me but you did sign up during March, please e-mail me at "rob dot williams at tg" and let me know as soon as possible. After I send out all of the e-mails, we'll allow four days for the remaining fill-outs.

If our contest wasn't enough and you are still hankering some prizes, then our friends at NinjaLane have got a cure. They are offering a couple killer DFI LanParty boards to two lucky winners. How do you enter? Check out the site and find out!

April 1st Tech Roundup

Motherboards & Processors
• AMD Phenom 9850 X4 Black Edition - Motherboards.org
• ASRock ALiveNF5SLI-1394 AMD Socket AM2 - OC Inside
• ECS GF7100PVT-M GeForce 7100 mATX - Big Bruin

Displays & Video Cards
• ASUS PG221 22-inch Widescreen - Think Computers
• ATI Radeon HD3450 - Techware Labs
• PowerColor HD 3450 - Overclockers Club
• Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 Atomic WaterCooled - Elite Bastards
• ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB - Benchmark Reviews

Memory & Storage
• Kingston DataTraveler 400 2GB Flash Drive - Think Computers
• OCZ Rally 2 Turbo 4GB - Phoronix
• Thermaltake BlacX - Tech Report
• US Modular Cold Fusion DDR2-800 2x1GB - TheTechLounge

Peripherals & Gadgets
• Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket Headset for iPhone and Curve - Legit Reviews
• Zalman FPSGUN FG-1000 Gun Style Gaming Mouse - Digit-Life

Cooling
• Nexus NHP-2200 Northbridge Cooler - BurnoutPC
• Thermal Compound Roundup - Technic3D
• Tuniq Sanctum HDD Cooler - Pro-Clockers

Chassis & Power Supplies
• Cooler Master COSMOS S Chassis - HotHardware
• Silverstone GD02 HTPC Case - OCIA
• Sunbeam 9-Bay Acrylic Case - Overclocker Cafe

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• HP Pavilion Elite m9200t - Digital Trends